How do I cope with a life at sea away from home?

You can read any water and chart any course. That mastery came from a life given to the sea, and the sea asked a steep price for it: a home you are rarely in. You are good at finding your way across the world, and yet often far from the one place you most want to be. That ache is honest, and it deserves to be named. The sea did not steal your home so much as ask you to choose, again and again, and you chose the water. There is no undoing those years, but there is deciding what the ones ahead look like. Ask yourself plainly whether the trade still serves you, or whether it is time to be home more than you are away. That is a captain's decision, and it is yours to make. Whatever you choose, make the time you do have at home count fully, present and undivided, rather than already thinking of the next departure. You cannot be in two places, but you can stop letting the sea take the shore hours too. Come home all the way when you are there. That much is within your power.